Over nine weeks in the spring of 1997, seven people who worked at fast-food restaurants in Middle Tennessee were killed during three robberies. Two died in Donelson, on the east side of Nashville, on a Sunday in February. Three died a few miles away, in Nashville's Hermitage area, after a late shift in March. Two young women were taken from an ice cream store in Clarksville in April and found dead the next morning. Three of the seven were teenagers.
Paul Dennis Reid Jr., who had moved to Nashville from Texas hoping to become a country singer, was arrested in June 1997 in a separate incident and then linked to all three crimes. Juries in Nashville and Clarksville convicted him of seven counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death seven times. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed every one of those sentences. He was never executed. After 2003 his case turned on a different question: whether a prisoner with brain damage and fixed beliefs that the government was watching and controlling him could decide for himself to drop his appeals and accept execution. The courts were still answering that question in 2013. He died in a Nashville hospital that November, at 55.
The court records describe a difficult childhood. Reid was born with hearing loss caused by a deformed left ear, and his parents divorced when he was three, according to the Tennessee Supreme Court's 2013 opinion. He moved among his mother, his grandmother and his father. A neuropsychologist who testified for the defense in 1999 described head injuries in childhood and later life, including a blow from his father in 1962. The 2013 opinion lists others: he was hit with a brick at about five, and at 13 a minibike accident fractured his skull. Doctors later found a lesion on the front of the left temporal lobe of his brain, and the experts in his cases agreed that head injuries had caused it or made it worse.
The trial record also noted a family history of mental illness, intelligence in the low-average range and dyslexia. Doctors had diagnosed brain dysfunction in 1964 and 1966, and psychotic disorders in 1978 and 1984. As a small child, the 2013 opinion records, he set fire to his grandmother's bed and killed her dog. As a juvenile he faced charges of auto theft, assault and forgery.
In 1982 Reid was charged with armed robbery in Texas and found incompetent to stand trial, the 2013 opinion states. (One of his later lawyers, interviewed by WPLN in 2006, placed a Texas finding of incompetence in the late 1970s.) In 1984 he was convicted in Texas of aggravated robbery, a conviction the parties in his Tennessee trials agreed was a violent felony. The record also shows that Texas evaluators had found him to be malingering, and that he admitted he had "fooled the shrinks" in the past. That history would weigh heavily against him when he later claimed to be mentally ill.
Reid moved from Texas to Nashville to pursue a career in country music, the Tennessee Supreme Court recorded, and he worked at a Shoney's restaurant until February 1997. The accounts of how that job ended differ. The Associated Press reported in 2013 that he was fired from a dishwashing job after throwing a plate at a co-worker. The 2013 opinion says he quit; the 2006 opinion says only that he left without severance pay. His former manager there later testified about him at trial.
By the start of 1997 he was short of money. A former co-worker testified that in January he heard Reid talk about robbing a fast-food restaurant at night, "when there would be no witnesses," and that Reid asked him for help getting a gun. A second co-worker said Reid described robbery as an easy way to make money and made the same request. Another man testified that he sold Reid two guns about eight to ten weeks before the March killings.
On Sunday, February 16, 1997, the day after he left the Shoney's job according to the AP, two employees were killed at a fast-food restaurant in Donelson, near the Shoney's. Steve Hampton, the manager, was 25. Sarah Jackson was 16. The restaurant was robbed and the two were shot. The Tennessee Supreme Court later summarized the case as the murders of two employees during a robbery, and Reid was convicted of both killings and of especially aggravated robbery.
When Reid died in 2013, Sarah's father told the AP that the news was "closure" for his family. "The guy who did it, he's gone and he's not going to hurt anybody else," he said.
Thirty-five days later, on Sunday, March 23, 1997, a second fast-food restaurant was robbed, about three miles from the first, as four employees finished the night shift. Three of them were killed and the fourth was badly hurt.
Ronald Santiago, 27, was the manager. His widow testified at the sentencing hearing that she and their daughter had suffered greatly, and his brother said the family was devastated; their mother was too ill to come to the trial. Andrea Brown, 17, was a student at Hume-Fogg High School, where, the Tennessee Supreme Court recorded, she was an excellent student with many friends. She did volunteer work at a homeless mission and wanted to become a chef. She had bought a car the day before she was killed, and her father told the jury that he had kept her room and her car as she left them. In 2013 he told the AP that she was "an innocent victim." Robert Sewell Jr. was 23. One of his sisters testified that his death had affected the family "in every way"; another said their mother could no longer bring herself to prepare family meals, and their father was too angry to attend the trial.
The fourth employee survived. Despite his injuries he called 911 after the robber left, and police arrived minutes later. He worked with a sketch artist on a composite drawing, and about four months after the shootings he picked Reid out from more than 300 photographs. He testified against Reid at trial. The State of Tennessee later recorded Reid's conviction for his attempted first-degree murder.
On the night of April 23, 1997, Angela Holmes, 21, and Michelle Mace, 16, were working at an ice cream store in Clarksville. Angela was married and had an infant daughter. Michelle had an older sister and a brother.
The store was robbed that night; the owner put the loss at $1,565.58. The two women had been abducted during the robbery, and they were found dead in Montgomery County the next morning. Both had been stabbed.
At the sentencing hearing Angela's husband told the jury that the killing had "changed everyone's life" and that their daughter "would never know her mother," and said he felt he should have protected his wife. Angela's mother said she could no longer take family photographs because of the empty place in them. Michelle's brother described anger, sadness and fear, and said their father was "totally destroyed." Michelle's mother said she no longer had her "little girl."
Reid was arrested in June 1997. The AP reported that he was accused of trying to kidnap and kill the Shoney's manager who had fired him, and that the incident led investigators to the restaurant killings. The manager testified about that incident at the 2000 trial.
Once Reid was in custody, the cases came together. A witness who had seen a car near the Clarksville store that night called police in June after seeing Reid's car on the television news. About four months after the March robbery, the surviving employee identified Reid from photographs.
The Montgomery County case rested on several kinds of proof, as the Tennessee Supreme Court summarized it in 2005. Business records and a credit card receipt with Reid's signature, confirmed by handwriting experts, placed him at a gas station less than a mile from the store at 9:45 p.m. that night. Several witnesses described a small red car like his red 1997 Ford Escort near the store or in the area later that night, though their accounts varied and some had first described a different car. Blood on Reid's left shoe was consistent with Angela Holmes's DNA profile. Fibers on the victims' clothing matched fibers from his car, whose floor mats were not standard for that model; he had bought them on March 25, 1997.
Two witnesses said Reid had talked about robbery as a way to make money. He was unemployed and had very little in his checking account that spring, yet after April 23, a friend testified, he paid half of her airfare to Nashville and paid cash for her meals, lodging and entertainment. The defense called witnesses who said the car they saw was a different color or make, and two people who had been in the store that evening said Reid was not the man they saw there. A defense DNA expert disputed the state's statistics.
In the Davidson County trial over the March killings, the state relied on the surviving employee's identification, on the co-workers who had heard Reid talk about robbery and seek a gun, and on the man who sold him guns. Police found no fingerprints, shoe prints or other physical evidence tying Reid to the scene. The state also used his finances: after losing his job without severance pay, he made cash purchases of more than $800, tried to invest $3,000, and had more than $1,000 in coins when he was arrested. The Tennessee Supreme Court held in 2006 that poverty alone proves little but that, coupled with unexplained spending after the robbery, it was relevant.
At the sentencing phase, Detective Pat Postiglione compared the March killings with the February ones. Both had been robberies of fast-food restaurants on a Sunday while they were closed; both restaurants were locked afterward with no sign of forced entry; and the way the victims were killed, he testified, was unlike any other case in Davidson County in at least fifteen years.
Reid was tried separately for each restaurant. The first trial, over the February killings, was held in Nashville in April 1999 in the Criminal Court for Davidson County before Judge Cheryl Blackburn. The jury convicted him of both murders and of especially aggravated robbery and sentenced him to death for each murder; the court added 25 years for the robbery, to run consecutively.
The Clarksville trial followed in September 1999 in the Circuit Court for Montgomery County before Judge John H. Gasaway III. Eight days before it was to begin, the defense asked for a ruling on whether Reid was competent to stand trial. After a three-day hearing, at which the experts disagreed, the judge found him competent. The jury convicted him of two counts of premeditated first-degree murder, two counts of especially aggravated kidnapping and one count of especially aggravated robbery. It sentenced him to death on September 22, 1999, finding three aggravating circumstances: a prior conviction for a violent felony; that the murders involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death, under Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-13-204(i)(5); and that they were committed to avoid arrest or prosecution. In closing, according to Amnesty International, the prosecutor told the jury the crime was driven by "greed," not illness.
The third trial, over the March killings, was held in Davidson County in 2000, again before Judge Blackburn, who refused a defense request that she step aside because she had presided over the first trial. Before it, a second competency hearing produced another split among the experts, and the judge again found Reid competent. The jury convicted him of three counts of premeditated murder, one count of attempted murder and one count of especially aggravated robbery, and returned death for each of the three murders. It found four aggravating circumstances: a prior violent felony, killing to avoid arrest, killing during a robbery, and mass murder, the last based on the February killings.
At sentencing the defense presented a substantial medical case. In the Clarksville trial a psychologist, Dr. Xavier Amador, diagnosed chronic paranoid schizophrenia, a cognitive disorder and brain damage, and described long-held beliefs that the government had been watching Reid for years; he said Reid suffered from anosognosia, an inability to recognize his own illness. A speech-language therapist described the birth defect of his ear, hearing loss and deficits in language and reasoning consistent with acquired brain injury. A neuropsychologist, Dr. Pamela Auble, found a shrunken and distorted left temporal lobe and saw no sign of malingering, and a neurologist, Dr. Robert Kessler, described MRI and PET scans that showed abnormalities consistent with traumatic injury.
The state answered with Dr. William Bernet, a forensic psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University, who acknowledged the brain damage but testified that Reid had a pattern of malingering and that he could find no link between his condition and the crimes. In the March case the state's expert said the brain damage was congenital and had not caused the killings. In each trial the juries chose death.
Under Tennessee law each death sentence went first to the Court of Criminal Appeals and then, automatically, to the Tennessee Supreme Court. All three judgments were affirmed.
The February case was decided first. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and both death sentences in State v. Reid, 91 S.W.3d 247 (Tenn. 2002), denied rehearing on December 19, 2002, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2003. The state court set an execution date of April 29, 2003.
The Clarksville case followed on May 24, 2005, in State v. Reid, 164 S.W.3d 286. Writing for the court, Justice E. Riley Anderson rejected fourteen claims of error. The court held that the trial judge had been right to find Reid competent, and that the defendant carries the burden of proving incompetence. It found that the trial court had wrongly excluded written summaries of some witness statements but that the error was harmless. It agreed that some of the prosecutor's arguments had been improper, including telling the jury that the victims were "the third and fourth person he's murdered," but held that the judge's instructions to the jury cured the problem. It found the evidence sufficient for every conviction and every aggravating circumstance and held that the death sentences were not disproportionate. It set an execution date of October 5, 2005. Justice Adolpho A. Birch Jr. concurred in part and dissented in part.
The March case was decided on December 27, 2006, in State v. Reid, 213 S.W.3d 792. Writing for the court, Justice Gary R. Wade upheld the trial court's competency finding, the admission of the former manager's testimony and the financial evidence, Judge Blackburn's refusal to step aside, and the use of the February killings to prove the mass-murder aggravating circumstance. The court set an execution date of January 3, 2008. Birch, sitting as a special justice, again agreed that the convictions should stand but dissented from the death sentences. He wrote that he continued to believe that the court's method of comparing death sentences was "inadequate to shield defendants from the arbitrary and disproportionate imposition of the death penalty." He also urged Tennessee's governor to follow California and Florida, where executions by lethal injection had been suspended while the drugs were studied.
Reid's own account of his situation was recorded at length in the later competency cases. He said that since 1985 a government agency he called "Scientific Technology" had been monitoring him and controlling his trials. He described those trials as "mock trials" in which actors played the lawyers. He spoke of a secret ten- to twelve-year sentence and of a fiancée named Susan whom the witnesses who knew him took to be imaginary. One of his lawyers, Kelly Gleason, told WPLN that he believed "every word, every action" had been recorded "by the military government" since 1985. In a 2006 affidavit his sister said he believed a government conspiracy was bombarding him with "scientific technology" and had linked giving up his appeals to ending that torment.
At the same time, Reid told several professionals that his delusions were a hoax he had used to avoid prosecution, the 2013 opinion records. Whether his beliefs were real, invented or both was the question that divided the experts for a decade.
In April 2003, with his first execution date approaching, Reid wrote a 92-page letter to state officials saying he would not pursue post-conviction appeals in the February case. His lawyers asked the Tennessee Supreme Court for a year's stay to decide whether to file, citing doubts about his competence to give up review; on April 22, 2003, the court refused, noting that he had been found competent in the other two cases and that counsel had offered no "truly new factual assertions."
One of his sisters then filed a petition in federal court as his "next friend." The district court dismissed it, but the federal appeals court stayed the execution and sent the case back for a competency hearing. On April 28, 2003, hours before the scheduled execution, Reid himself filed a post-conviction petition in Davidson County, without a lawyer. The trial court stayed the execution and appointed the Office of the Post-Conviction Defender. Reid later wrote that he had "errored" in signing the petition and tried to withdraw it.
In November 2004 his lawyers filed an amended petition that Reid had not signed, explaining that they had not asked him to because of their "firmly held opinion that Petitioner is currently incompetent." The trial judge adopted a civil standard for competence, and the dispute went to the Tennessee Supreme Court. On June 26, 2006, in Reid v. State, 197 S.W.3d 694, Justice Cornelia A. Clark wrote that a petitioner is "incompetent to pursue post-conviction proceedings only if he is unable either to manage his personal affairs or to understand his legal rights and liabilities," and that he must prove it by clear and convincing evidence. If he did, the court said, the answer was not to freeze the case but to appoint a next friend or guardian to pursue it. Birch again wrote separately. In a companion ruling in May 2006, the court held that a trial court could not act on a petition the prisoner had not signed unless a proper basis for a next friend had been shown.
In 2006 Tennessee set Reid's execution for June 28, 2006. Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal to Governor Phil Bredesen, describing Reid as a man with a history of serious mental illness who had given up his appeals. Another sister filed next-friend petitions in state and federal court in May 2006. The Montgomery County court dismissed hers in June for failing to make a prima facie showing, but the federal court found that she had made one. On June 27, 2006, Amnesty reported, a federal judge blocked the execution to decide whether Reid was competent to drop his appeals, and the state's request to lift the stay was refused the next day. WPLN reported at the time that the state wanted the execution to proceed without a competency hearing.
Then the state changed position in federal court. On August 24, 2006, it withdrew its objection to his sister acting as next friend, on the strength of its own expert, the forensic neuropsychologist Dr. Daniel Martell, who had concluded that Reid could not then make a rational decision to give up his appeals under the test set by the United States Supreme Court in Rees v. Peyton. Martell's report described persecutory delusions on top of an antisocial personality disorder. In state court, the state would later argue that Reid was competent.
On July 3, 2007, the Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated his sister's Clarksville petition and sent it back for a hearing. In Davidson County, Judge Blackburn held hearings in 2007, declined to find Reid incompetent, but refused to let him withdraw his petition, citing fairness and the stakes of a death case. On December 26, 2007, his sister filed a further next-friend petition in the March case, where the question was whether Reid had been incompetent during the year allowed for filing.
The decisive hearings took place in May 2008, in Davidson County on May 12 and 13 and in Montgomery County on May 14 and 15. Dr. George Woods, a forensic psychiatrist appointed by the court, diagnosed psychosis with paranoid delusions linked to brain damage and found Reid incompetent. Dr. Bernet diagnosed depression, antisocial personality disorder and pathological lying, and viewed the delusions as a defense mechanism; he found Reid competent. Martell, who had found him incompetent in 2006, now testified that he was competent, though with some hesitation, accepting that some symptoms were genuine but pointing to signs of malingering in testing. A former investigator for the defender's office testified that Reid had "descended completely into his delusion." In Montgomery County, Dr. Michael First testified that Reid was delusional and that Bernet's conclusions were at odds with what the investigator had seen.
Both trial courts ruled against the petitioners: Davidson County on December 12, 2008, and Montgomery County on December 18, 2008. Each found that Reid had not been proved incompetent. In May 2009 the Davidson County court dismissed the petition Reid had filed himself. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed both trial courts on August 8, 2011.
On January 24, 2013, a unanimous Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed, in an opinion by Justice William C. Koch Jr. joined by Chief Justice Wade and Justices Janice M. Holder, Cornelia A. Clark and Sharon G. Lee. The court held that both trial courts had applied the correct standard and that his sister and the defender's office had not proved by clear and convincing evidence that Reid lacked the capacity to give up post-conviction relief. It also settled the law for future cases: when a prisoner's competency to pursue post-conviction relief is properly raised, the question is "whether the prisoner is able to make rational decisions concerning the management of his or her post-conviction appeals," under the standard in Tennessee Supreme Court Rule 28, section 11(B), and not whether he can care for himself. The AP summarized the ruling as finding that, although Reid was brain-damaged, his advocates had not proved him mentally incompetent to abandon his appeals. Under it, others could no longer appeal for him against his wishes.
Reid was held on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The Tennessee Department of Correction announced that he was pronounced dead at 5:55 p.m. on Friday, November 1, 2013, by a physician at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. He was 55. The AP reported that he had been in the hospital for about two weeks; hospital and corrections officials declined to comment on reports that he had been ill. The department said the cause of death would be determined by the state medical examiner, and no cause was made public at the time. None of his seven death sentences was carried out.
Families of the victims had heard that week that he was in the hospital. Andrea Brown's father told the AP he was "glad he's dead."
In October 2014 Judith Yates, a writer with more than 25 years in criminal justice, published When Nashville Bled: The untold stories of serial killer Paul Dennis Reid, a book that, Clarksville Now reported, centered on the victims and survivors rather than on Reid. Speaking in Clarksville in 2015, Yates said that families had not "moved on" after his death and that people in the city still drove past the store every day. "The main focus is on those who were lost," she said.
The case also left its mark on Tennessee law. The 2013 ruling on a condemned prisoner's competency to give up his appeals, arising from Reid's cases, set the standard Tennessee courts were directed to use from then on whenever the question is properly raised.
Reid's mental state. Defense experts and some court-appointed experts found genuine schizophrenia or delusional disorder linked to brain damage. Other experts, including Dr. Bernet, found malingering and pathological lying, and Reid himself told professionals his delusions were a hoax. The state's own expert found him incompetent to waive appeals in 2006 and competent in 2008. The courts found him competent to stand trial and, in 2008 to 2013, held that incompetence had not been proved; they did not find that he was free of mental illness.
How the Shoney's job ended. The AP reported that he was fired after throwing a plate at a co-worker; the 2013 opinion says he quit; the 2006 opinion says he left without severance pay.
The Clarksville car. Witnesses' descriptions of the red car varied, some first described a different car, and two people in the store that evening said Reid was not the man they saw. The jury convicted on the combined evidence.
The March case had no physical evidence tying Reid to the scene; it rested on the survivor's identification and circumstantial proof.
The June 1997 incident with his former manager led to his arrest, but the outcome of any separate charge from it has not been reported.
The Texas incompetency finding is dated to 1982 in the 2013 opinion and to the late 1970s by one of his lawyers.
1962: according to defense testimony, Reid suffers a head injury from a blow by his father.
About age 5 and age 13: further head injuries, the second a skull fracture in a minibike accident.
1964 and 1966: diagnoses of brain dysfunction; 1978 and 1984: diagnoses of psychotic disorders.
1982: charged with armed robbery in Texas and found incompetent to stand trial.
1984: convicted of aggravated robbery in Texas.
1985: the year from which, he later said, a government agency had been monitoring him.
Later: moves to Nashville to pursue country music; works at a Shoney's until February 1997.
January 1997: tells a co-worker he could rob a fast-food restaurant at night; asks for help getting a gun.
February 16, 1997: Steve Hampton, 25, and Sarah Jackson, 16, are killed in a robbery at a fast-food restaurant in Donelson, Nashville.
March 23, 1997: Ronald Santiago, 27, Andrea Brown, 17, and Robert Sewell Jr., 23, are killed in a robbery at a fast-food restaurant in Hermitage, Nashville; a fourth employee survives.
April 23, 1997: Angela Holmes, 21, and Michelle Mace, 16, are abducted in a robbery at a Clarksville ice cream store; they are found dead the next morning.
June 1997: Reid is arrested after being accused of trying to kidnap and kill his former manager.
About four months after the March robbery: the surviving employee identifies Reid from more than 300 photographs.
April 1999: convicted in Davidson County of the February murders; two death sentences.
September 1999: found competent, convicted in Montgomery County of the Clarksville murders; death sentences on September 22.
2000: convicted in Davidson County of the March murders; three death sentences.
2002: Tennessee Supreme Court affirms the February case (91 S.W.3d 247); rehearing denied December 19.
April 2003: Reid's 92-page letter giving up appeals; April 22, stay refused; April 28, his own petition, filed hours before the April 29 execution date, leads to a stay.
May 24, 2005: Tennessee Supreme Court affirms the Clarksville case (164 S.W.3d 286).
June 26, 2006: Tennessee Supreme Court sets the post-conviction competency standard in Reid v. State (197 S.W.3d 694).
June 27, 2006: a federal judge stays the execution set for June 28.
August 24, 2006: the state drops its objection to his sister acting as next friend in federal court.
December 27, 2006: Tennessee Supreme Court affirms the March case (213 S.W.3d 792).
May 12 to 15, 2008: competency hearings in Davidson and Montgomery counties.
December 12 and 18, 2008: both trial courts find incompetence not proved.
August 8, 2011: Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
January 24, 2013: Tennessee Supreme Court affirms; others can no longer appeal against his wishes.
November 1, 2013: Reid dies at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry, aged 55, on death row.
October 2014: Judith Yates publishes When Nashville Bled.